Remembrance Day

The second anniversary of Jen's death, July 21st, was an outwardly unremarkable day. Five people remembered enough to send cards or flowers - four of them were people I spoke to on morning Jen died, so that's a testament to their dedicated support of us. My oldest son, Primus, went to see the band 'Rise Against' at Festival Hall. When we were booking that ticket weeks before I pointed out the date, and he wondered whether he should still go. I said (I hope correctly) that I didn't think Jen would want us to overshadow everything with the need to mourn. It's of course hard to be sure what Jen would have wanted, or if she could see us now whether she'd want the same things as she did two years ago. C. S. Lewis comments, in 'A Grief Observed', that invoking the wishes of the dead (as a parent) can become a thin disguise for our own wishes. So perhaps I should have said that I didn't want grief to overshadow the chance to see a good band, even as I still wanted him to remember Jen.

As I've said before on this blog, because Jen's death was quite close to both the boys' birthdays, I've tried to shift the focus of our remembrance to a different occasion, to Mothers' Day, when all three of us have run in the Mothers' Day Classic ( a breast cancer fundraiser). That's not been completely successful, or at least not in the way I hoped it might be as a time of reflection. Equally I find for myself that I can't escape the anticipation of the July anniversary, even though it's remembered by few others. There are of course a handful of other significant dates -- Jen's birthday, Christmas, our wedding anniversary, our birthdays, the day of first diagnosis -- that also resonate with loss. Christmas and birthdays particularly are occasions when there is an event, a gathering, and Jen is not there and never will be any more.

There must come a time in life when many of the poeple you most cared about are dead, and the challenge of remembrance is not just for one person. Our culture largely ignores and denies the reality of death. A curious aspect of this was seen in the flood of public emotion around the sudden death of Princess Diana in 1996, where responding to her death became for some a way of expressing grief for other deaths, especially ones that had not been properly mourned. So I've started to reflect on how other people shape their remembrance and grief.

In my reading, I notice that during and after major wars, grief becomes part of the mental landscape. Emily Dickinson's historical context in the American Civil War must have some connection with her focus on death and grief. I've also been reading a detective novel partly set in post-war Berlin (Philip Kerr's "Field Grey"), and the main character, Bernie Gunther, comments that

Conversations in Germnay were often like this: people would just stop in the middle of a sentence and remember a place that was gone or someone who was dead. There were so many dead that sometime you could actually feel the grief on the streets, even in 1954. The feeling of sadness that afflicted the country was almost as bad as it had been during the Great Depression.

The title of this blog was prompted by the reflection that in Australia we have public days for remembering the dead from the major wars of the twentieth century, Anzac Day and Remembrance Day (Armistice Day). While now they can be for many only historical markers, closer to the time they were I imagine a strong focus for those who had lost someone they care about in the conflict. I guess also that there was some solidarity in grief -- you were not only remembering your loss but also those of others you knew, and they were remembering you.

Beyond war memorials, where do we find such a day that could be another focus for grief? In quite a few European countries, All Saints Day (at the start of November) is an occasion when people visit the graves of dead relatives, and in some place light candles, and in some denominations there is a matching service with a focus on the faithful who have died. I wonder if it could be of some benefit in Australian churches to have that kind of day - not as a special service only aimed at the bereaved (as some palliative care places do), but one that involves the whole congregation. I'm sure there are already resources for this, for example within the Anglican liturgy, and I'd appreciate my liturgically-inclined friends giving me some suggestions. What do you think? Is there value in a focus for public remembrance, or does that feel intrusive? Is it better just to remember the life and death of people we loved in the privacy of our own inner circle?